When you first launch Excel, it starts you off with a new blank worksheet.

A worksheet is the grid of cells where you type your information and formulas. This grid is the most important part of the Excel window. It's where you'll perform all your work, such as entering data, writing formulas, and reviewing the results. Each workbook is comprised of one or more worksheets, and each worksheet is made up of individual cells. Each cell contains a value, a formula, or text. A worksheet also has an invisible draw layer, which holds charts, images, and diagrams. Each worksheet in a workbook is accessible by clicking the tab at the bottom of the workbook window. In addition, workbooks can store chart sheets. A chart sheet displays a single chart and is also accessible by clicking a tab. The grid divides your worksheet into rows and columns. Columns are identified with letters (A, B, C), while rows are identified with numbers (1, 2, 3).The smallest unit in your worksheet is the cell. Cells are identified by column and row. For example, B4 is the address of a cell in column B (the third column), and row 4 (the sixth row). An Excel cell can hold up to 32,000 characters. A worksheet can span an eye-popping 16,000 columns and 1 million rows. When you enter information, you enter it one cell at a time. However, you don't have to follow any set order. For example, you can start by typing information into cell B40 without worrying about filling any data in the cells that appear in the earlier rows.

Active cell indicator

This dark outline indicates the currently active cell.

Column letters
Letters range from A to IXFD. To select an entire column click a column heading.

Office button
This button have a lots of options for working with Excel.

Formula bar
Cell information or formulas appear in this line.

Name box
Displays the active cell address or the name of the selected cell, range, or object.

Page view buttons

Change the way the worksheet is displayed by clicking one of these buttons.

Quick Access Toolbar

A customizeable toolbar that holds commonly-used commands

Ribbon The main location to find Excel's commands. Row numbers

Numbers range from 1 to 1,048,576, to select an row click a row number.

Sheet tabs
Each of these tabs represents a different sheet in the workbook.

Sheet tab scroll buttons

These buttons let you scroll the sheet tabs to display tabs that aren't visible.

Status bar
This bar displays various messages like status of the Num Lock, Caps Lock, and ScrollLock keys on your keyboard.

Tab list
Similar to a menu, display a different ribbon.

Zoom control
Worksheet in and out zoom controller. The current cell in above figure is B7. You can recognize the current (or active) cell based on its heavy black border. You'll also notice that the corresponding column letter (B) and row number (7) are highlighted at the edges of the worksheet. Just above the worksheet, on the left side of the window,the formula bar tells you the active cell address.

Worksheet Basics
Excel is the world's most widely-used spreadsheet program, and is part of the Microsoft Office suite. Other spreadsheet programs are available, but Excel is by far the most popular and has become the world standard. Much of the appeal of Excel is due to the fact that it's so versatile. Excel's forte, of course, is performing numerical calculations, but Excel is also very useful for non-numerical applications. Here are just a few of the uses for Excel:

Number crunching: Create budgets, analyze survey results, and perform just about any type of financial analysis you can think of.

Creating charts: Create a wide variety of highly customizable charts. Organizing lists: Use the row-and-column layout to store lists efficiently. Accessing other data: Import data from a wide variety of sources. Creating graphics and diagrams: Use Shapes and the new SmartArt to create professional-looking diagrams.

Automating complex tasks: Perform a tedious task with a single mouse click with Excel's macro capabilities.

This tutorial covers the very basic task like: Create, Navigate, Add Information, Move Data, Manage Worksheets and Workbooks. And also cover the basic and smart formatting tricks and printing techniques.

Ribbons
The most dramatic change in Office 2007 is the new user interface. Traditional menus and toolbars are gone, and theyve been replaced with the Ribbon. Office 2007 is the first software in history to use this new interface, and it remains to be seen whether it will catch on and replace traditional menus and toolbars.

The Tabs of the Ribbon

Quick overview of what each tab provides:

Home
Includes some of the most commonly used buttons, like those for cutting and pasting information, formatting your data, and hunting down important bits of information with search tools.

Insert
Lets you add special ingredients like tables, graphics, charts, and hyperlinks.

Page Layout
Is all about getting your worksheet ready for the printer. You can tweak margins, paper orientation, and other page settings.

Formulas
Are mathematical instructions that you use to perform calculations. This tab helps you build super-smart formulas and resolve mind-bending errors.

Data
Lets you get information from an outside data source (database) so you can analyze it in Excel. It also includes tools for dealing with large amounts of information, like sorting, filtering, and subgrouping.

Review
Includes the familiar Office proofing tools (like the spell checker). It also has buttons that let you add comments to a worksheet and manage revisions.

View
lets you switch on and off a variety of viewing options. It also lets you pull off a few fancy tricks if you want to view several separate Excel spreadsheet files at the same time.

Add-Ins
This tab is visible only if youve loaded a workbook or add-in that customizes the menu or toolbars. Because menus and toolbars are no longer available in Excel 2007, these customizations appear in the Add-Ins tab.

Ribbon Collapse
Do you want to use every square inch of screen space for your cells? You can collapse the ribbon by double-clicking any tab. Click a tab to pop it open temporarily, or by right mouse click on a tab then Minimize the Ribbon or double-click a tab to bring the ribbon back for good. And if you want to perform the same trick without raising your fingers from the keyboard, you can use the shortcut key Ctrl+F1.

Contextual Tabs
Excel 2007 also includes contextual tabs. Whenever an object such as a chart, picture or a table is selected, specific tools for working with that object are available in the Ribbon. Follwing figure shows thecontextual tab that appears when a chart is selected.

Customizing Quick Access Toolbar

In previous versions of Excel, end users can customize their menus and toolbars. Things have changed in Excel 2007. Now, the only end user customization option is the Quick Access Toolbar. Normally, the Quick Access Toolbar appears on the left side of the title bar. Alternatively, you can display the Quick Access Toolbar below the ribbon. Right-click the Quick Access Toolbar and select Show Quick Access Toolbar Below Ribbon. By default, the Quick Access Toolbar contains three tools: Save, Undo, and Repeat. You can customize the Quick Access Toolbar by adding other commands that you use often. To add a command from the Ribbon to your Quick Access Toolbar, right-click the command which you want to add and choose Add To Quick Access Toolbar. If you click the downward-pointing arrow to the right of the Quick Access Toolbar, you see a drop-down menu with some additional commands that you might want to place in your Quick Access Toolbar. Figure below shows the Customization section of the Excel Options dialog box. To display this dialog box right-click the Quick Access Toolbar and choose Customize Quick Access Toolbar.

The Taskbar
Taskbar appears automatically in response to several commands. For example, if you want to insert aclip art image, choose Insert > Illustrations > Clip Art. Excel responds by displaying the Clip Art Task bar, shown in Figure below. When youre finished using a Task bar, click the Close button in the upper right corner. By default, the taskbar is docked on the right side of the Excel window, but you can drag it anywhere you like.

Create a Worksheet
Create Excel Worksheet When you fire up Excel, it opens a fresh workbook file. If you've already got Excel open and you want to create another workbook, just select Office button > New. This step pops up the New Workbook window as showing in image below.

The New Workbook window lets you create a new, blank workbook or a ready-made workbook from a template.

Adding the Column Headings

The most straightforward way to create a worksheet is to design it as a table with headings for each column. For example, in a worksheet that stores a mailing list, you could have two columns: one for names and another for addresses. But if you create more than two columns, your life will probably be easier since you can separate first names from street addresses from Zip codes, and so on.

If you enter the first and last names together in one column, Excel can sort only by the first names. And if you clump the addresses and Zip codes together, you give Excel no way to count how many people live in a certain town or neighborhood because Excel can't extract the Zip codes.

The benefits of a six-column table are: it lets you sort your list according to people's last names or where they live. It also allows you to filter out individual information when you start using functions. The first step in creating your worksheet is to add your headings in the row of cells at the top of theworksheet. Adding information is easy just click the cell you want and start typing. When you're finished, hit Tab to complete your entry and move to the next cell to the right or Enter to head to the cell just underneath. For a simple expense worksheet designed to keep a record of your most prudent and extravagant purchases, try these headings: 1. Date Purchased stores the date when you spent the money, 2. item stores the name of the product that you bought and 3. price records how much it cost. As showing in figure below:

The standard width of an Excel column is 8.43 characters, which hardly allows you to get a word in edge wise. To solve this problem, position your mouse on the right border of the column header you want to expand so that the mouse pointer changes to the resize icon. Now drag the column border to the right, as you drag a tooltip appears, telling you the character size and pixel width of the column.

Adding Data
Now begin adding your data, simply fill in the rows under the column titles. Each row in the worksheetrepresents a separate purchase (or record ). As the first column is for dates, the second column is for text, and the third column holds numbers (price). Excel doesn't impose any rules on what you type, so you're free to put text in the Price column. But if you don't keep a consistent kind of data in each column, you won't be able to easily analyze and understand your information later.

Data Editing
Every time you start typing in a cell, Excel erases any existing content in that cell. If you want to edit cell data instead of replacing it, you need to put the cell in edit mode. Move to the cell you want to edit, you can use the mouse or the arrow keys to get to the correct cell. Put the cell in edit mode by pressing F2 or you can also get a cell into edit mode by double-clicking it. Edit mode looks almost the same as ordinary text entry mode. The only difference is that you can use the arrow keys to move through the text you're typing and make changes. When you aren't in edit mode, pressing these keys just moves you t

Navigating
Learn how to move around the Excel grid quickly. To move from cell to cell, you have two basic choices: 1- Use the arrow keys on the keyboard, keystrokes move you one cell at a time in any direction. 2- Click the cell with the mouse. A mouse click jumps you directly to the cell you've clicked. As you move from cell to cell, you see the black focus box move to highlight the currently active cell. You can also use some useful short keys to quickly jump cell to cell.

Shortcut Keys for Moving Around a Worksheet

Left arrow or Tab key
Moves one cell to the right.

Right arrow or Shift Tab key

Moves one cell to the left.

Up arrow
Moves one cell up.

Down arrow
Moves one cell down.

Page Up
Moves up one screen. Thus, if the grid shows 10 cells at a time, this key moves to a cell in the same column, 10 rows up.

Page Down
Moves down one screen. Thus, if the grid shows 10 cells at a time, this key moves to a cell in the same column, 10 rows down.

Home
Moves to the first cell (column A) of the current row.

CTRL + Home Moves to the first cell in the top row, which is A1. CTRL + End or End, Home
Moves to the last column of the last occupied row. This cell is at the bottom-right edge of your data.

Excel also lets you cross great distances in a single bound using a Ctrl+arrow key combination. These key combinations jump to the edges of your data. Edge cells include cells that are next to other blank cells. For example, if you press Ctrl+ Right Arrow while you're inside a group of cells with information in them, you'll skip to the right, over all filled cells, and stop just before the next blank cell. If you press Ctrl+Right Arrow again, you'll skip over all the nearby blank cells and land in the next cell to the right that has information in it. If there aren't any more cells with data on the right, you'll wind up on the very edge of your worksheet. The Ctrl+arrow key combinations are useful if you have more than onetable of data in the same worksheet. For example, imagine you have two tables of data, one at the top of a worksheet and one at the bottom. If you are at the top of the first table, you can use Ctrl+Down Arrow to jump to the bottom of the first table, skipping all the rows in between. Press Ctrl+Down Arrow again, and you leap over all the blank rows, winding up at the beginning of the second table.

Use Go To Command

You can use the Go To feature to make the jump, Go To moves to the cell address you specify. It comes in useful in extremely large spreadsheets, where just scrolling through the worksheet is a headache. The Go To window maintains a list of the most recent cell addresses that you've entered so the Go To feature becomes more useful the more you use it. This feature makes it easy to jump to a far-off cell and quickly return to your starting location by selecting the last entry in the list.

The Go To window isn't your only option for leaping through a worksheet in a single bound. If you look at the Home Tab then Editing > Find & Select menu you'll find more specialized commands that let you jump straight to cells that contains formulas, comments, conditional formatting, and other advancedExcel ingredients.

Formula Bar
You can use the formula bar to enter and edit data, instead of editing directly in your worksheet. This approach is particularly useful when a cell contains a formula or a large amount of information. That's because the formula bar

gives you more work room than a typical cell. Just as with in-cell edits, you press Enter to confirm your changes or Esc to cancel them. Or you can use the mouse: When you start tying in the formula bar, a checkmark and an "X" icon appear just to the left of the box where you're typing. Click the checkmark to confirm your entry, or "X" to roll it back

Ordinarily, the formula bar's a single line. If you have a really long entry in a cell (like a paragraph's worth of text), you need to scroll from one side to the other. However, there's another option you can resize the formula bar so it fits more information, as shown in figure below.

Status Bar
The status bar is a good way to keep on top of Excel's current state. For example, if you save or print adocument, the status bar shows the progress of the printing process. If you're performing a time-consuming operationsay, printing out an 100 pages table you can look to the status bar to see how things are coming along. You can hide or show the status bar from View Show/Hide Status Bar. The leftmost part of the status bar shows the Cell Mode, which displays one of three indicators. The word "Ready" means that Excel isn't doing anything much at the moment, other than waiting for you to take some action. The word "Enter" appears when you start typing a new value into a cell. The word "Edit" means the cell is currently in edit mode, and pressing the left and right arrow keys moves through the cell data, instead of moving from cell to cell.

The right on the status bar are the view buttons, which let you switch to Page Layout View or Page Break Preview. These different views help you see what your worksheet will look like when you print it. The zoom slider is next to the view buttons, at the far right edge of the status bar. You can slide it to the left to zoom out (which fits more information into your Excel window at once) or slide it to the right to zoom in (and take a closer look at fewer cells). In addition, the status bar displays other miscellaneous indicators. For example, if you press the Scroll Lock key, a Scroll Lock indicator appears on the status bar. This indicator tells you that you're in scroll mode. In scroll mode, the arrow keys don't move you from one cell to another; instead, they scroll the entire worksheet up, down, or to the side. Scroll mode is a great way to check out another part of yourspreadsheet without leaving your current position. You can control what indicators appear in the status bar by configuring it. To see a full list of possibilities, rightclick the status bar. A huge list of options appears, as shown in figure below .

Status Bar Customization

Cell Mode
Shows Ready, Edit, or Enter depending on the state of the current cell. Signatures, Information Management Policy, and Permissions Displays information about the rights and restrictions of the current spreadsheet. These features come into play only if you're using Office SharePoint Server to share spreadsheets among groups of people (usually in a corporate environment).

Caps Lock
Indicates whether Caps Lock mode is on.

Num Lock
Indicates whether Num Lock mode is on.

Scroll Lock
Indicates whether Scroll Lock mode is on. When it's on, you can use the arrow keys to scroll theworksheet without changing the active cell. This feature lets you look at all the information you have in your worksheet without losing track of the cell you're currently in.

Fixed Decimal Indicates when Fixed Decimal mode is on. When this mode is on, Excel automatically adds a set number of
decimal places to the values you enter in any cell. For example, if you set Excel to use two fixed decimal places and you type the number 5 into a cell, Excel actually enters 0.05. This seldom-used featured is handy for speed typists who need to enter reams of data in a fixed format. You can turn this feature on or off by selecting Office button Excel Options, choosing the Advanced section, and then looking under "Editing options" to find the "Automatically insert a decimal point" setting. Once you turn this checkbox on, you can choose the number of decimal places (the standard option is two).

Overtype Mode
Indicates when Overwrite mode is turned on. Overwrite mode changes how cell edits work. When you edit a cell and Overwrite mode is on, the new characters that you type overwrite existing characters (rather than displacing them). You can turn Overwrite mode on or off by pressing Insert.

End Mode
Indicates that you've pressed End, which is the first key in many two-key combinations; the next key determines what happens.

Macro Recording
Macros are automated routines that perform some task in an Excel spreadsheet. The Macro Recording indicator shows a record button (which looks like a red circle superimposed on a worksheet) that lets you start recording a new macro.

Selection Mode
Indicates the current Selection mode. You have two options: normal mode and extended selection. When you press the arrows keys and extended selection is on, Excel automatically selects all the rows and columns you cross. Extended selection is a useful keyboard alternative to dragging your mouse to select swaths of the grid. To turn extended selection on or off, press F8.

Page Number
Shows the current page and the total number of pages. This indicator appears only in Page Layout view.

Average, Count, Numerical Count, Minimum, Maximum, Sum

Show the result of a calculation on the selected cells. For example, the Sum indicator shows the total of all the numeric cells that are currently selected.

View Shortcuts
Shows the three view buttons that let you switch between Normal view, Page Layout View and Page Break Preview.

Zoom
Shows the current zoom percentage.

Zoom Slider Shows a slider that lets you zoom in closer (by sliding it to the right) or out to see more information at once (by sliding it to the left).